UCLA alumnus Fred Ramsdell on his 2025 Nobel Prize
2 Video Views·Oct 17, 2025
UCLA alumnus Fred Ramsdell shares his pride in receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in recognition of his pioneering work on regulatory T cells (Tregs). He emphasizes the importance of basic research and thanks his collaborators for their decades of scientific companionship.
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I'm Fred Ramsdell. I won the Nobel Prize this year for physiology and medicine concerning my work
around the human immune system and what I and my fellow colleagues did about 25 years ago now
was to discover how the human immune system regulates itself so that we don't end up with
autoimmune diseases but are still able to reject pathogens like viruses and bacteria and similar
things. What we believe is that this discovery will now lead to new therapeutic approaches,
new ways to treat diseases like arthritis, Crohn's disease, and we're actually beginning
clinical trials to test that right now. The education I got at UCLA was incredibly first
class. I got to work with people across different disciplines, across different departments.
UCLA was really good at providing a foundation that said basic science is important but it's
important in large part because it leads to meaningful impacts in people's lives. Federal
funding has always been an incredibly central part of all biomedical research. It's undeniable
that the United States has been at the forefront globally of biomedical research for generations
and no one wants their aunt or their child to die from a disease. They don't have to
and this is the kind of work that leads to those opportunities. You know my wife and I go hiking,
backpacking every fall after Labor Day and we were just up in the mountains in Wyoming
and eventually my wife's phone, which was not in airplane mode, exploded and she screamed and came
out and told me I won the Nobel Prize and I really I just thought you're kidding me and then I realized
that not that many of my friends could be coordinated enough to trick me that way. Well
she went and got a bottle of champagne from the hotel, which wasn't even champagne, it was Prosecco
but close enough. We went and sat at the bar of an Irish pub and had pub food for dinner and a beer
and that was it. Went back and started answering more text messages and emails. It was kind of
surreal actually, it was pretty funny.